Why Use Asterisk@Home and Not Roll Your Own? One of our favorite pundits on Voxilla summed it up this way:
After using Asterisk@Home for three months, we haven't found a single thing we couldn't do that someone with a roll-your-own version of Asterisk could. Asterisk@Home is not crippled in any way. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's not only full-blown Asterisk but it's also AMP (Asterisk Management Panel, think of it as PHPmyAdmin for Asterisk) plus functioning music on hold (just try to get it working on a vanilla Linux box!) plus voice support for any speech application you can dream up plus a Flash Operator Panel plus ring groups plus calling queues plus conferencing plus DID routing plus SQL-compliant Call Detail Reporting plus SugarCRM contact management with integrated dialing plus SpanDSP fax support plus Microsoft Outlook TAPI integration with a Microsoft TAPI gateway (that works!) plus Apache, PHP, SSH, SFTP, SendMail, Web Mail, and MySQL integration plus Cisco XML support (to load your contact management info into your Cisco IP phones) plus xPL for Home Automation plus H.323 NetMeeting support plus turnkey support for SIP, IAX2, auto-configuring ZAP channels, and ENUM.
What we have found is that we can implement solutions for clients in a couple of minutes or hours that would have taken weeks or months to learn to do had we gone the roll-your-own route. That includes building IVR and AutoAttendant solutions literally in minutes, supporting five or more VoIP providers and numerous departments each with numerous phones of all flavors, implementing complex dialing rules, remote phone access, voicemail with email and SMS alerts, and out-of-the-box support for virtually every 3-digit calling feature provided by local Baby Bells.
Are there folks that want to master calling plans, extension syntax, contexts, Linux, Apache, SendMail, MySQL, PHPmyAdmin, WebMin, Web Mail, Asterisk and all its add-on's plus Linux dependency hell? Absolutely. But Asterisk@Home doesn't preclude your using anything you learn. It just gives you an incredible, leveraged head start. Asterisk@Home is a deceptive moniker. It's not stripped-down, crippled, or condensed in any way. Quite the contrary, it's Asterisk on Steroids, plain and simple. Worked great for Major League Baseball, didn't it?